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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, nmgreens@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Project
  • Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 12:23:38 -0600


Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Project
http://www.grass-roots.org/usa/zuni.shtml
Pueblo of Zuni
Donald Eriacho, Director
Andry Laahty, Assistant Director
Fred Boannie Jr., Assistant Director
P.O. Box 630
Zuni, N.M. 87327
(505) 782-5851
(505) 782-5852 Ext 15
(505) 782-2726 fax

Two simple structures that span washed-out gullies in the bottomland fields
of the Zuni reservation located in the mesa country of western New Mexico's
high desert tell a surprising story.

One structure is a modern, relatively high-tech device called a "rock
gabion." A dam-like structure made of large rocks molded into neat, square
retaining walls by heavy wire, it spans the gully from side to side and from
top to bottom. It was made by a crew from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and
it took weeks and dollars to produce.

The other one -- descriptively called a "brush and rock structure" -- comes
from an ancient Zuni tradition. As the name implies, it is little more than a
pile of brush -- juniper and sagebrush, mostly, or whatever's handy -- held
down in the gully bottom by a layer of flat, heavy rocks. A crew from the
Zuni Conservation Project built it in a couple of hours by drafting all
hands, from engineers to the office clerical staff. It didn't cost a cent.

Both structures are designed with a similar purpose: By holding back the rush
of water that occurs after high-desert storms, they reduce erosion and retain
precious water for irrigating crops, no small matter in farm country that
gets only 12 inches of rain per year on the average.

But one key difference is becoming clear: The old Zuni structure WORKS. Rich,
heavy silt is quickly forming behind it, and grass is beginning to grow in
the gully bottom, providing a natural barrier to further erosion. The U.S.
Geological Survey is running tests, and it's believed that the gully will
gradually fill in, returning land to the agricultural inventory. The modern
structure, on the other hand, despite its cost, appears to be making a bad
situation worse. The center of it has washed out, strewing rocks downstream;
the gully is nearly six feet deep now, and twice as wide, and it's quickly
undercutting grazing fields.

This is what the Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Project is all about, Donald
Eriacho said: Restoring the best of the old ways, capturing the historic
techniques through interviews and oral histories with older members of the
tribe and passing them along to new farmers -- while also adopting the best
that new technology has to offer, from computerized land inventories to
satellite-based Global Positioning System equipment for mapping the
reservation's farms more accurately than ever before.

"We want to get our Zuni land back into farming as it once was," Donald
Eriacho said. "In 1910, this place produced 10,000 acres of corn. The Zuni
people could supply all the military forts with corn. People passing through
going west, here they were at the point of no return. They were sustained by
the Zuni people and went on their way."

But cultural changes through two world wars, and an environment despoiled by
bad use -- not least by the government itself, which permitted overcutting
and overgrazing in the mountains overlooking the Zunis' beautiful valleys --
destroyed much of the region's agriculture and saddled the 9,000-person
reservation with the sadly typical economic profile that afflicts most
American Indian reservations today, with deep poverty and long-term, chronic
unemployment.

There's a chance that this will turn around now, though, thanks to a long,
hard-fought lawsuit. The Zuni tribe in 1978 filed suit against the federal
government, seeking to amend the damage done to its land. In 1980, the
government settled the dispute, establishing a permanent Zuni Indian Resource
Development Trust Fund, the interest from which goes to a variety of
environmental and sustainable projects including fish and wildlife, range
conservation, hydrology, soil erosion projects, a native seed bank and much
more, creating nearly 50 jobs on the reservation and making the project one
of the region's major employers.

And now, with the project's Sustainable Resource Development Plan complete
and awaiting the signature of the Secretary of the Interior, and the
consultant that helped the tribe set up the Sustainable Project now
withdrawn, leaving the Zuni people themselves in charge (Eriacho became the
project director on Nov. 1, 1993), they're ready to start implementing the
plans they've spent the last two years drawing up.

Zuni brush and rock structures are already going in alongside the BIA's
rock-and-metal gabions, and Bowannie and Laahty have conducted personal
interviews with hundreds of farmers, accumulating all the data in a computer
databank for study. Now, they hope beginning this summer, they will begin
training and technical assistance work and some plain hard selling to
encourage the farmers to learn new techniques AND the good, old ones, in the
interest of making the tribe's farmland green again.

"It's taken us a long time to get to this point, and it's going to take a
long time to finish," Eriacho said. "After 200 years of trying, something's
got to change soon. It's going to be a chain reaction, so when more farmers
come on, they'll turn around and train more, and they'll go on down the line."




  • [Livingontheland] Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Project, Tradingpost, 10/20/2004

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